While net neutrality rules are designed to protect consumers from a lack of last-mile competition, the agency's moves on municipal broadband are intended to actually strike at the issue of limited competition at the root. As we've noted a few times, ISPs (with ALEC's help) have passed laws in twenty states preventing those towns and cities from deciding their own infrastructure needs for themselves.

It's pure, unabashed protectionism: the bills do little more than protect regional duopolies from change while hamstringing local communities desperate for better service. Usually the laws are passed under the auspices of protecting taxpayers from themselves, ignoring that the bills' sole purpose is to protect duopoly revenues.

The poster child for poor customer experience in these industries - Comcast - was not only the lowest-scoring TV service and Internet service provider, but it was also one of the lowest-scoring companies in the entire Ratings. It ranked 289th overall out of 293 companies for its Internet service and ranked 291st overall for its TV service.

Of the 17 companies that received "very poor" ratings (below 50%) across the 193 companies, five of them were from these two industries: Comcast for TV (43%), Comcast for Internet (45%), Time Warner Cable for Internet (47%), Charter Communications for TV (48%), and Time Warner Cable for TV (48%).

"Internet and TV service providers are awful to consumers. The lack of competition continues to fuel this bad experience epidemic," states Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group.

The Karuk and Yurok Tribes have been collaborating to bring the speeded-up service to the Klamath River communities of Orleans, Weitchpec, Wautec, Johnsons as well as Orick. A $6.6 million California Public Utilities Commission grant, awarded in October 2013, is financing the project. The tribes provide matching funds.

If the city of Fort Collins made a sound while examining the possibility at offering its own Internet service, it'd be the chirps and whirrs of a 56K modem — Almost connected but with no guarantee of success.

Scott County has a high-speed, fiber optic network available for businesses and Internet service providers to tap into.

Neighboring Dakota County doesn’t. One result? Up to 10 companies that were wooed by Dakota County communities instead chose Scott County for its access to limitless bandwidth, according to Craig Ebeling.

Ten city councils and a standing room only crowd packed the United Farmers Cooperative Berdan Center on Monday for a public hearing and adoption of a tax abatement resolution to fund a loan to the Renville-Sibley County Fiber Joint Powers Agency for the RS Fiber Cooperative.

The City of Sanford, in collaboration with the SREGC, intends to finance and own a fiber-optic network connecting 80 community institutions and private enterprises — businesses, the hospital, municipal facilities, the mill complex, industrial parks, schools — in Sanford-Springvale.

Last year, the SREGC commissioned a study on the feasibility of bringing broadband (fiber-optic) communications access to the city. The company that did the study — Tilson Technology Management company of Portland — concluded that broadband access has the potential to add “between $47 and $192 million to the Sanford-Springvale region’s economic output over the next ten years.”

Creating a truly high-speed, affordable municipal internet network could be a pipe dream – or it could be a pipeline to a more vibrant Concord with a booming economy and a growing population of young entrepreneurs and knowledge workers.

According to Batman, what started out as a few towns became a larger collaboration to find a high-speed Internet service provider for the area. He said the group contacted these companies with a few ideas, including a public-private partnership.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of interest in such a venture.

"It simply is not a viable alternative," Batman said. "It simply is too expensive to serve me and my neighbors without financial incentives and support."

The battle is typical of the Big Guys (telecommunications companies) verses the Little Guys (Municipal Electric Providers). My rural district which is comprised of 3 rural counties, Dickson, Hickman, and Maury, need expanded broadband service to make us competitive for industrial and business recruitment. We need expansion of broadband service into unserved areas to help our students do homework assignments and our residents to connect to a high speed internet service for business and pleasure. This service is already available to our state’s residents in densely populated areas all over the state of Tennessee.

My rural counties and constituents need broadband and internet service too, and I plan to vote to help them get it.

The Yolo County Board of Supervisors in California voted unanimously recently to accept consultants' recommendations to take steps improve broadband in the county. Some of those recommendations included investing in infrastructure to improve both urban and rural areas in the northern county.

With its diverse mix of rural and urban areas, the county has communities where little or no broadband service is available. And even in urban areas with greater access to service and providers, many residents complain of slow and unreliable connections, according to the Yolo Broadband Strategic Plan, which also provided direction for county officials on closing the divide in the coming years.

The strategic plan, commissioned in 2013, notes that in some areas residents must rely on dial-up or satellite:

“Residents are generally limited to low-speed connections that prevent these users from accessing the majority of online content,” reported John Honker of Magellan Advisors LLC, which prepared the report.

“Using the Internet for anything but simple Web browsing is challenging in these communities,” he said.

The situation is especially critical for farming communities in the county, reports the study:

Yolo's agricultural populations are also challenged by poor access to broadband, especially in the farming and seed technology industries. Yolo farms are often unable to keep up with the technological advancements in the agricultural field that would allow them achieve greater productivity and better management of their natural resources.

In the more urban areas, such as the City of Davis (home of UC Davis), residents complain they cannot get the service they need in households with multiple devices. In those cases, the bandwidth they need is just too expensive if it is available. These same communities complain of unreliable networks.

Almost a third of Yolo County residents who responded to the study survey reported that they use satellite or dial-up for Internet access, 35 percent said they use AT&T DSL, 18 percent reported they use Frontier DSL, and 18 percent reported they use mobile Internet. Eighty-five percent of respondents reported download speeds of slower than 6 Mbps, reports the Yolo County profile from the study.

“Yolo County is on the wrong side of the digital divide,” [Honker] told county supervisors. “The more devices we’re using, we’re taxing our connections more, creating demand for the services and the networks can’t keep up.”

Arlington is finally ready to open up its network to local businesses seeking better connectivity, reports local news WJLA. The county board recently voted unanimously to allow providers to lease dark fiber from approximately 10 miles of the 59-mile network. They hope to spur economic development and entice ISPs to provide better connectivity for residents via the network.

"The dark fiber, in the most simplest terms, is like a super highway. You're the only car on that highway and you can go as fast as the vehicle you've chosen can go," explained Jack Belcher, chief information officer of Arlington County.

We first reported on Arlington's network in 2012, after the community had dedicated about 2 years to the project. They took advantage of investments in the local Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) upgrades, improvements to the emergency communications system, and an electric power upgrade by a local electrical provider to deploy a next generation network.

The original plan was focused on schools, traffic management, and public safety, but last year community leaders chose to investigate expanding the network for economic development. We spoke with Belcher last May in Episode #97 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast.

In a recent meeting of the Dakota County Administration, Finance and Policy Committee, Dakota County's Network Collaboration Engineer David Asp provided an update to Commissioners on the status of their broadband plan. Dakota has saved millions of dollars with their network through collaborative efforts, innovative dig-once approaches, and specially deveoped software.

As part of its long term strategy, the county is now considering ways to offer connectivity to local businesses and residents via open access infrastructure. Blandin on Broadband's Ann Treacy attended the February 3rd meeting and, thanks to Asp, posted the PPT from his presentation.

We spoke with David Asp in Episode #117 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. In 2011, Dakota County was named one of the Intelligent Community Forum's 21 Smart Communities.

We learned while developing our case study on Dakota County that their efforts to coordinate excavation, including specialized software they developed themselves, has reduced the cost of installing fiber by more than 90 percent. We estimated the County has saved over $10 million in fiber and conduit deployment costs.

In 2014, Broward County completed its transition from an expensive leased data, video, and voice communications system to its own fiber network. The southern Florida county is now saving $780,000 per year with plenty of room to grow. With the transition to an IP-based telephony system, the County also saves and additional $28,000 per year.

In 2009 when the network was too slow to be effective, county staff knew they had to act. Costs were increasing 15% each year as the number of lines grew and the demand for bandwidth increased. The County also had to provide funding to reach locations that the carrier's network did not serve. The situation made it difficult to budget; there was always a need to fund unexpected expansions and increasing service.

Several groups in Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) began working together to develop a way to improve systems for both groups:

Working together the teams developed a 3-year strategic initiative to upgrade Broward County to a 10 GigE core network infrastructure. Part of the plan called for reducing complexity and duplication of infrastructure, so the County also decided to converge the voice and data networks and, with voice and data traversing the same circuits, network redundancy would have to be increased because a single line outage could cause a location outage for both critical services.

As Broward County developed the new network, they faced an 18 month deadline. The contract with the incumbent was set to expire and the parties would then move to a month-to-month arrangement. That plan would increase the County's costs by 50%. Martin County, located north of Broward, faced a similar situation when they set to develop their county-woe network. Read more about Martin County's incredible savings in our report, Florida Fiber: Martin County Saves Big with Gigabit Network.

Fortunately, the ETS Team was able to share conduit space with the state Department of Transportation (DOT) to cut costs and reduce deployment time. Martin County struck up a similar working relationship to dramatically reduce time and expense.

After a six-month design phase and a four-year construction period, the County's 41-mile underground fiber optic backbone now provides voice, video, and data. The network provides 10 gig capacity to 21 county facilities. The County spent approximately $2.5 million to build the fiber network.

One of the most important characteristics of local government will always be accessibility to constituents; reliable telephony is a must. Broward County knew that the new network would mean a phone system change. ETS chose an IP-based system, which was half the cost of a non-IP based system.

County staff now engage in video conferencing and have access to soft phone technology, allowing them to make phone calls over the Internet. The IP system is scalable to tens of thousands of phones as the county's needs grow.

The IP-based system cost a total of $2.3 million, which included telephones, applications, licenses, voice mail, call centers and servers for 30 locations. The system costs $100,000 per year as compared to the legacy system, which was $700,000 per year.

We have encountered a number of other agencies that found significant savings by using publicly owned infrastructure for telephony. Notably, Austin Independent School District (AISD) in Texas. AISD partnered with several other Austin area agencies to eventually deploy the Greater Austin Area Telecommunications Network (GAATN), completed in 1998. AISD faced an estimated $3 million cost for telephones in 1988. Their $18 million contribution to the project paid for itself in less than 3 years.

Broward County has positioned itself to save millions over time, ensured a reliable system, and controlled its telecommunications costs. Florida has state barriers limiting how the county can use its fiber for economic development or to improve residential service but if that situation changes in the future, Broward County has a valuable economic development tool already in place.

Howard County has become an Internet Service Provider, not just to itself, but to private firms as well. To improve Internet access for businesses, it is both leasing dark fiber to existing providers and directly offering services to businesses and buildings.

We are grateful that Chris could join us for a Chris2 interview! We discuss how and why Howard County chose this strategy and how it is benefiting the community.

Minneapolis, MN —In 2010 the Minnesota legislature set a goal: universal access to high speed broadband throughout the state by 2015. It is now 2015 and large parts of Greater Minnesota will not achieve that goal, even as technological advances make the original benchmarks increasingly obsolete.

But some Minnesota communities are significantly exceeding those goals. Why? The activism of local governments.

A new report by ILSR, widely recognized as one of the most knowledgeable organizations on municipal broadband networks, details the many ways Minnesota’s local governments have stepped up. “All Hands On Deck: Minnesota Local Government Models for Expanding Fiber Internet Access” includes case studies of 12 Minnesota cities and counties striving to bring their citizens 21st century telecommunications.

Windom, which is one of the most advanced networks in the state, built their own network after their telephone company refused to invest in their community.

Dakota County showed how a coordinated excavation policy can reduce by more than 90 percent the cost of installing fiber.

Lac qui Parle County partnered with a telephone cooperative to bring high speed broadband to its most sparsely population communities.

Read how these and other communities took control of their own connectivity and their community vitality. Some did it alone while others established partnerships; each chose the path they considered the best for their own community.

In November, the Broadband Alliance of Mendocino County (BAMC) released a report documenting the results of an online survey to determine the effects of a summer communications outage. The Willits News reported that the survey revealed losses of over $215,000 in the county, although actual losses likely reach the millions.

In August, an accident wiped out Internet, telephone, cell, and 911 services for eight communities along the coast in Mendocino County. AT&T aerial fiber optic cable was destroyed. Approximately 17,400 people lost access to 911 services. Depending on the location, 911 service was out for 24 to 45 hours.

Only about 6.5 percent of the people in Mendocino County participated in the survey according to the report. Ninety-five percent of those responding said they were directly impacted.

According to the BAMC, the outage was lengthy because "the AT&T backbone fiber network was not configured to be redundant nor diverse with protection routing. This was not due to the lack of fiber in the surrounding routes. AT&T did provide diverse fiber and protection for their cable station, but elected not to provide the same for the surrounding community and emergency services."

The incident in Mendocino County is much like a similar event in 2010 in which Cook and Lake Counties in Minnesota were cut off in the same way. At that time, a single Qwest line was cut and, since there was no redundancy, 911 service, Internet, and many business services came to a screeching halt.

Yet another reminder of the risks that come with depending on distant mega-corporations for essential infrastructure.

Each entity expects to see significant savings as they eliminate leased lines. Woodstock's annual projected operational costs will be $33,784, reducing municipal connectivity costs by about $13,448 per year by eliminating leased lines. Woodstock will also enjoy the ability to budget from year to year without the threat of unpredictable rate increases from current provider Comcast. City Manager Roscoe Stelford told the Northwest Herald:

The potential economic development opportunities, allowing area businesses to buy and use the new network, alone makes the project significant, he said.

“Having that high-tech infrastructure in the City of Woodstock is going to be another feather in our cap for us to secure economic development opportunities,” Stelford said.

The network will bring a 10 gigabit fiber back bone from the MCC campus through downtown to the County Government Center. Laterals will branch out to municipal and school facilities. The current plan includes gigabit connections to 24 municipal buildings, public safety sites, schools, recreation centers, a library, a work force center, and an opera house.

Comcast now charges District 200 approximately $109,000 per year for connectivity. When leased lines are eliminated, the District will spend approximately $48,500 as their share for operational and management costs. In addition to saving over $60,000 per year, District 200 will be able to offer students future-proof infrastructure. From the Woodstock Independent:

“It’s an exciting position to be in, and there are other things we’ll see savings on,” said [school] board member William Nattress. “Technical refreshment, new applications will be easier and less expensive now that we have this backbone.”

District 200's share is the largest because it requires more connections. Budgetary uncertainties at the state level have created concern for District 200 so Woodstock and McHenry County will cover District 200's $806,526 share with an interest-free, four-year loan.

For the total project, McHenry County will be responsible for $760,526; Woodstock will contribute $386,624; MCC will provide $54,423; and the Emergency Telephone System Board will contribute $105,800.

The Northern Illinois University's Broadband Development Group will coordinate the project; the network may be up and running as early as summer 2015.

According to the law, local communities can ask voters to reclaim local authority to establish a telecommunications utility. We have seen Longmont, Montrose, and Centennial take action in prior years. In Longmont, the community has successfully established a telecommunications utility and the community is loving it.

An interesting wrinkle in Colorado is the wide support across the state - communities that vote heavily for Democrats supported local authority for municipal networks in similar numbers that those in areas voting heavily for Republicans.

In Yuma County, where approximately 85% of voters supported the GOP Senate candidate, the measure to reclaim local authority passed with 72% of the vote. Yuma County overwhelmingly voted for the Republican candidate for Governor and every race in Yuma County went to a Republican candidate. The cities of Yuma and Wray within the County also had their own ballot initiatives to reclaim local authority; those ballot measures also passed by 72%.

Rio Blanco County's numbers were very similar to those in Yuma County. The only exception was that their ballot question 1A on reclaiming local authority passed with 76%. Again, every race went to a Republican candidate in Rio Blanco County.

Boulder, with considerable fiber assets already in place, decided to take the possibility of using those assets to the voters this year and the voters said yes. Much like the voters in Yuma, Wray, Yuma County, and Rio Blanco County, Boulder voters approved their measure 2C by a high 83.6%. Unlike the voters in Yuma, Wray, Yuma County, and Rio Blanco County, Boulder chose to support Democratic candidates in every race. Many of those races were not close.

If we see communities described as strongly supporting either Republican or Democratic candidates also supporting municipal network authority, it is logical that communities with mixed support of both parties would also support local authority initiatives.

Cherry Hills Village in Arapahoe County and Red Cliff in Eagle County each presented similar ballot questions to voters and both passed. Red Cliff's results are not official as of this writing but are projected at about 60-70% and Cherry Hills Village results are around 80%. Arapahoe County voters elected a mix of Republican and Democratic candidates with some races very close. Eagle County voters also chose mixed representation.

Yesterday's election in Colorado showed us that supporting local government authority to build or partner in fiber networks is popular across the political spectrum. Regardless of their party affiliation, they agreed that those smart decisions should be made at home, not by legislators in Denver. And if they were going to give advice to the new Congress in DC, it would probably be to restore and preserve local decision-making on this issue.

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Critics also charge that municipalities only succeed due to tax exemptions and subsidies -- but Florida municipalities return as much, if not more, funds to public treasuries that private telecom firms. And as for subsidies -- well, incumbents themselves have received direct subsidies of nearly $390 million in the last five years to provide service in Florida.